What’s the point of book blurbs?

December 29, 2017

I must start with a thank you. Over the years people much more expert/ famous/ distinguished than I am have done me the great good turn of writing a blurb for the cover of my books (never quite as naff as the above, but you know the kind of thing). I am extremely grateful.

But I have started to wonder if there is any point in the whole thing, in the sense of whether they sell more books. Publishers obviously think they do make a difference , otherwise they wouldn’t put such effort into assembling whole rosters of them to adorn the jacket. And I suppose I can see that at the margins you might be encouraged to buy a book from someone you had never heard of that was recommended by several people you had.

Would that be wise, though? I rather doubt it. For a start you would have no guarantee that the recommender had actually read the thing. I am, of course, sure that all my blurbers had done their due diligence (no aspersions being cast), and when I do the job, I certainly read the book (not perhaps lingering over every word, but still I read it)! I know for a fact that not all blurbers do. “Terrific read .. .” as quoted from an A list celebrity, or “A distinguished first book . .” from an A list professor, probably aren’t worth the paper they are written on. You would probably be better off looking at the acknowledgements and see who the author is thanking. That said, there is a tendency for authors to thank anyone they ever had coffee with in order to display their impeccable ‘connections’.. and possibly to make it more difficult for their enemies to review the book (on the ‘thank ’em, then they won’t be asked or will have to say no’ principle). So maybe that’s no more reliable.

I have more or less given up blurbing books. That’s partly because, despite the conviction of publishers, I really don’t think that there are more than a handful of people who are likely to say ‘Oh Mary Beard rates this, I think I will get it’. And partly because, if you read the book, it takes a long time (and path of blurb whoredom — puffing without reading whenever asked — is one you don’t want to tread).

Besides, there are all kinds of irritating and other time-consuming sides to it. Some authors and publishers write personal notes (‘Professor X hoped that you might enjoy her book, because she knew you were interested in this topic…. and she hopes that if you enjoy it, you might provide an endorsement). But I get infuriated with the mass mail shots from eager publicists along the lines of, ‘I am sure you will find that X is a fresh new voice in the field, bringing a stunning new perspective to Roman religion/ women studies / our understanding of the ancient world . . .’. The temptation to write back pointing out, as is often true, that you taught X since he was 18 / that you supervised the PhD on which the book is based / that you consistently advised him not to publish it . . . is almost irresistible.

But worse, a sincere and straightforward comment can get you into any amount of trouble (and consequent indignation). A couple of years ago I gave some fairly simple praise to a book on disbelief, comparing it favourably to ‘many crude modern discussions of atheism (both pro and anti)’. This led to a well-known philosopher writing to the publishers suggesting that they would ‘do the book a favour by reprinting the dust jacket’ (without my comment obviously). You can imagine how that one ran and ran. Then just the other week, after I had praised a book on the classical impact on Bob Dylan, with the words:

‘At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan. Richard Thomas takes us from Dylan’s high school Latin club to his haunting engagement with Ovid and Homer in recent albums. Thomas carefully argues that Dylan’s poetry deserves comparison with Virgil’s–and Thomas, senior professor of Latin at Harvard and author of some of the most influential modern studies of Virgil, should know!’ (though I suspect only the first sentence went on the cover, I haven’t checked).

Anyway, this then turned up in the Guardian review of the book as follows:

‘There is a definite suggestion of intellectual snobbery in Thomas’s choice of title: Why Dylan Matters. It is echoed, too, in his fellow classical scholar, Mary Beard’s assertion on the book cover: “At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan.” Both suggest, unconsciously or otherwise, that Dylan’s songwriting only really matters if he can be shoehorned into the Homeric tradition and that academic canonisation is the ultimate vindication of Dylan’s worth.’

OK, one may not know what one’s unconscious is doing, but I wasn’t remotely trying to suggest, nor did I say, that ‘Dylan’s songwriting only really matters if he can be shoehorned into the Homeric tradition’. I think there are many ways of approaching Dylan; my point was that it was interesting to see quite how much Classics there is in his lyrics (for better or worse).

At this point, I just thought why bloody bother… no more blurbs for me. I have ‘more or less’ given up is going to turn into I have ‘completely’ given up.